Farmer Focus: Monday scorchio Tuesday scorchio Wednesday…
© Jason Bye My grandfather assumed that I would want to take over the farm and he trained me from an early age with farmer-type questions.
One of his favourites was, “So, John Pawsey, what is the weather going to do this week?”
If I was unable to repeat the exact forecast he had heard that morning on his crackly Roberts radio, he would scold: “Well you’re not going to be much of a farmer if you don’t know what the weather’s going to do, are you?”
See also: Harvest 2022: Low-protein issues for biscuit and bread wheats
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And he was right, I didn’t become much of a farmer but I did become a weather forecast obsessive.
But recently I’ve given up because it’s become so dull. Monday, scorchio. Tuesday, scorchio, Wednesday, scorchio etc. There are better things to listen to.
Shimpling Park Farm looks more like the Serengeti than the usual calming harvest time hues of green and gold.
The straw of our crops is white rather than an evenly ripened yellow.
Our sheep pace our treeless East Anglian fields like restless Wildebeest looking for shade or water.
Our ponds and ditches are beds of bleached stones. To coin a phrase I enjoyed while out in Australia in the mid 1980s: “It’s as dry as a frog’s tit.”
All that said, harvest has not been a disaster by any means. My single-tillered spring crops have been saved by a sunny June making every grain just that little bit heavier than normal.
Similarly, our winter crops have found some moisture from somewhere and are showing some of the highest specific weights I can remember.
However, the drought has had an effect and I suspect that when all our yields are tallied we will be looking at an average harvest.
I suspect that if we had received 60mm of rain in May rather than the 20mm we got, we would have been looking at a record-breaking one.
There’s always next year.
